A New Time, a New Blog

After torching my old site (Wordpress, vulnerable, was compromised, bla, bla) I was long thinking about what to do with the new. I wanted to make it easier for me to publish new posts, and a bit more tech savvy, that is. And I wanted to have a static site that does not expose my server to all the world.

I first looked at Jekyll and Octopress as they seemed to be the big players in the field of static site generators.

They worked ok. However I didn’t want to learn Ruby if I wanted to change some functionality. They also seemed complicated for what I had in mind.

So after a while I ended up with Cryogen, an easy to use and fairly simple static site generator written in Clojure. Since Clojure is the language I want to dive in deeper that seems the perfect fit for me.

To start a new website with cryogen, first install Leiningen, the Clojure build tool, and then type:

$ lein new cryogen my-site
$ lein ring server

This create a new Clojure project from the “cryogen” template. lein ring server starts listening for changes in the posts and pages and creates a web server that listens at http://localhost:3000.

As soon as you change contents or add a page it will re-create the static site in my-site/resources/public.

Oh, and you can write your posts and pages in Markdown or Asciidoc. To use Asciidoc just add the appropriate plugin to the my-site project.

To publish the site simply copy the contents of this directory to your DocumentRoot or a Github Pages repository, etc.

One thing I’m thinking about is adding client side search to my site via something like lunr.js, which seems like a cool project.

So here it is, a new site, and a new blog. I hope due to a simple publishing chain I will keep on posting stuff.